Life’s Manson is almost supernaturally powerful; he comes to his power over young women through “day-long sexual marathons.” In Life’s portrait the saga of the Manson Family reads as if it belongs to the tradition of the American captivity narrative—one of the oldest and most significant forms of processing gender relations. The original captivity narrative chronicled the alleged kidnapping and “conversion” of white women, often very young, by Native American men. Life is plying not “true crime” here, but another sort of (sex) crime narrative, one whose origins stretch back earlier than the founding of the republic and which has continued to bear fruit in modern narratives of American white women—Jessica Lynch above all—captured during the “War on Terror.”66 Life establishes a template that would be copied by so many others, including Bugliosi. Manson is the “Indian” in this scenario, only recently released from captivity himself, and now applying the mind-control techniques he learned in prison to exploit vulnerable young women. Here Manson is not the countercultural insurgent of the February 9, 1970, issue of Tuesday’s Child—the infamous Manson “Man of the Year” cover—or Bernadette Dohrn’s “The Weathermen Dig Charles Manson.” This is Charlie as Svengali, the hypnotic outsider controlling young women.67 While George du Maurier original novelistic depiction of Svengali in Trilby (1894) (and various film adaptations) depicted the controlling older man as frighteningly Jewish, by the 1960s the characterization was more or less mainstreamed and was commonly used to describe the relationship of powerful figures in the music business to the talent they produced, managed, and so on. The portrait of Manson as all-powerful, hypnotic man offered by Life and other mainstream media outlets makes it more possible to understand a bizarre interruption in 5 to Die: in the photographic insert in the book, the authors break from the pictures of the crime scene, key players in the drama and so on, to invite readers to study and notice the similarity in facing pictures of Manson and John Barrymore, playing Svengali in a 1931 film version of Eliot’s novel.
A Legion of Charlies
It was in the Los Angeles Free Press that the countercultural press wrestled with the “truth” about Charles Manson and his Family with the most sustained attention. Even before Ed Sanders began his long series of articles about the case, the Freep was giving serious attention to the Tate-LaBianca murders and the arrests of Manson and his followers. The Free Press, as cultural historian Rachel Rubin has recently explained, debuted in 1964 as a newsletter at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. By the end of the decade it was an influential switchboard for the counterculture—connecting up numerous political and cultural constituencies.1 During December of 1970, the Free Press began regularly to resist the anti-hippie narratives developing in the wake of the early December “break” in the case. In the next few months, with no clear editorial stance (other than mistrust of official and semi-official narratives about the case) the Freep gave over a huge amount of space to Manson: news articles, letters, advertisements for his music, poetry and prose by the accused himself, editorials, sketches, and a full printing of Manson’s statement to the court during his trial, all found a home in the pages of the Freep. The main burden the Free Press attempted to carry, at least in the first couple of months after Manson and other Family members were captured, was to stake out a legible anti-anti-hippie position.
Lawrence Lipton, born in 1898, led the charge. In his regular column “Radio Free America” he angrily opposed the anti-counterculture dogpile that had greeted Manson’s apprehension. Lipton responded to local newscaster Piers Anderton’s claim that the murders were somehow a “natural” outgrowth of hippie life by asking “What have you discovered in the music of Bob Dylan, Donovan, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane or the Rolling Stones that leads inevitably to stabbing people to death?”2 (Leaving off the Stones would have made for a more powerful case, given the recent tragedy at Altamont, of course.) Two of the most interesting early entries in the Freep’s Manson coverage actually came with letters sent in by Marvin Garson, a former student activist at Berkeley, and then a Bay Area radical and publisher of the important underground paper the San Francisco Express-Times (which folded early in 1969). Garson, while not promoting full-blown conspiracy theories, did contend that the district attorney must have been overjoyed to stumble upon Susan Atkins—the “freakout hippie girl”—who could not stop telling tales in jail. In a subsequent issue Garson wrote again to enjoin the editors of the Free Press to “assume Manson is innocent, just as a mental exercise. It might lead you to some interesting pieces.”3 (This letter appeared very close on the page to an advertisement asking for information about a runaway thirteen-year-old girl; such notices appeared frequently in the pages of the Free Press and may well have contributed to the sense that Manson had been exploiting a very real and intractable social problem.) Lipton, from his beat perch at Venice Beach, was more willing to engage with alternative explanations for the crime, even suggesting in a March column that the murders might have been the work of “plastic hip squares” (a claim he had already made in August 1969); the gruesome details of the Tate and LaBianca murders were just the sort of “magnified and over-decorated refinements” often found when members of the establishment attempt to mimic real cultural insurgents.4
The Free Press was consistently absorbed (from December 1969 through much of the following year) with claiming Manson for the counterculture. This is not to say that its coverage was organized around exonerating the accused man, but simply to note that the implicit claim of the Freep’s journalism on the case was that it was better situated to understand Manson, his Family, his legal strategy, and so on, than the mainstream press was. A large part of this had to do with simple matters of will and column inches. As early as January 1970, the alternative paper was devoting a great deal of space to considerations of Manson’s changing legal strategy given the emergence of Susan Atkins’s recent confession. One in-depth article appeared side-by-side with a cut-out coupon for a promotional LP put out by Frank Zappa’s Bizarre/Straight record labels (with contributions by the GTOs, Captain Beefheart, and Wild Man Fischer) and addressed “Dear Establishment Freaks.” Everything about the Free Press—from ad copy to font type to the very matter of journalistic real estate committed to the impending trial—signaled that the arrest of Manson and his followers was of great importance to members of the counterculture, whether Manson turned out to be a hippie or not.5
The Free Press articles are worth pausing over because they may well represent a relatively isolated effort to imagine Manson as an individual—rather than the symbol he would become for so many commentators. What is perhaps noteworthy for later readers of Ed Sanders’s book The Family, is how sympathetic Sanders is—at least at first—to Manson and his followers. This framework of sympathy was established by the Freep before Sanders arrived on the scene; in an early major article on Manson, the Free Press’s correspondent—almost certainly thinking of the infamous Life magazine cover—makes special mention of the “gentle cast” of Manson’s eyes. (A year later Yippie leader Jerry Rubin would publish We Are Everywhere, in which he would recount how he “fell in love” with Manson’s “sparkling eyes” and “cherub face” when he first saw him on television).6 It is impossible to know, of course, how much Michael Hannon’s “direct” quotations of Manson are, in fact, direct, but it is clear that his work was aimed at reintroducing Manson to Free Press readers as at once a countercultural rebel and a vulnerable outsider. After recounting his distrust of lawyers (“The second lawyer came in here and he wanted to incorporate me”), Manson, in a set of winter 1970 interviews, works with Hannon to present himself as a sort of working-class hero: “My philosophy comes from underneath the boots and sticks and clubs they beat people with who come from the wrong side of the tracks.”7 As for the media obsession with the circumstances of his own birth, Manson told Hannon that the newspapers refer to his mother as a “whore, but she was really just like the flower children. I was born from love.”8
Hannon’s sympathetic two-p
art interview in the Free Press was, over the course of 1970, joined by an abundance of other supporting materials. In March, for instance, Manson’s entire “pro per” statement (essentially the case that he should be allowed to serve as his own lawyer) was printed in the Freep—full as it was of wonderfully implausible demands. The Freep also printed highly stylized drawings of Manson, poetry and prose written by the prisoner (and supporting documents written by the Family), and advertisements and coupons for his music and writing. But it was Ed Sanders’s bitter, comic, and outraged writing on the trial that was the heart of the Free Press coverage of Manson’s trial. While Sanders’s general stylistic attack (the “cheap head prose” dismissed by a later critic) will be familiar, what is jarring is how completely Sanders’s anti-government and anti-bourgeois orientation had prepared him to find Manson and his followers worthy of sympathetic attention, and how willing Sanders was to use the Manson case to launch a variety of radical critiques of political and social business-as-usual.9
Ed Sanders hit the pages of the Freep in May of 1970 and his first target was the police; Rolling Stone’s June 25, 1970, piece was correct to note that much of the seemingly “pro-Manson” coverage in the underground press was really more aptly described as “anti-cop.”10 In Sanders’s first article (cheekily titled “Back at the Ranch”) the police are described as an occupying force, constantly raiding the ranch without search warrants, looking for “runaways, for murder information, and one suspects, for thrills.” Sanders is clearly wary of the worshipful stance taken by the women at Spahn toward their jailed leader, but is also concerned about how the imagined (male) (sexist) readers of the Freep might be projecting their desires onto these besieged figures. Sanders calls these readers into being only to then warn them not to “go out to the Spahn Movie Ranch hoping that you’re going to be sucked off by naked girls with LSD smeared on their lips riding machine gun mounted dune buggies, buddy.”11
Later, in a 1975 lecture and 1976 written manifesto, Sanders would codify much of his work as belonging to a domain he called “investigative poetry”: “the poets are/marching again/upon the hills/of history” Sanders announced, arguing that it was the task of the history-writing poet to be “uncompromising, “revolutionary,” “seditious,” and “absolute.”12 While Sanders’s Free Press articles are not “poetry” in any standard definition of the term, they are full of figurative language, appeals to sound as well as sense, and dazzlingly allusive elements. And given the dominant media culture’s rush to convict Manson well before his trial, there is much about this work that could be considered “uncompromising” if not, in fact, “revolutionary.”
The work Sanders published “about” Manson is about Manson and many other pressing social concerns as well. In “Back at the Ranch” Sanders meditates on what keeps the Family together, even with their leader in jail and even with almost constant police harassment. His conclusion, quite surprisingly, is music. Having visited the ranch and observed the social function of music-making among the remaining Family members, Sanders files this report:
[T] he songs of Charles Manson, especially as interpreted by the Family every night at the Spahn Ranch group sings, are often moving and sometimes beautiful. A lot of it is better than what you pay six dollars for at the Fillmore. About one week at Johnny-On-The-Spot Rehearsal Studios and a good engineer would enable the friends of Manson to leave groups like Crosby-Stills eating gravel. To the friends of Manson, it’s the music they perform together that sustains a life style surrounded by hostile police, buzzing helicopters, bulldozers, and the constant intrusion of crew-cut tourists and reporters from Paris Match, The National Enquirer, Stern, Time, Ladies Home Journal, and The Russian Journal of Astrophysics.13
Sanders trods some heavy terrain here. First there is his wonderful sideswipe at David Crosby and Stephen Stills; perhaps Sanders shared Terry Melcher’s sense that Crosby, who “broke up the Byrds and joined Buffalo Springfield, and broke them up,” was “worse for the good feelings” of the hippie era “than Manson was.” More significant, of course, is Sanders’s embedded contention that collective, not-for-profit music-making can be a force of social cohesion and mutual support.14
Sanders went even further with his appreciation of the music of these “friends of Manson.” “No one can prevent its beauty,” he wrote, nor “its revolutionary implications”: “For if the high school kids of the United States ever start singing together, adios oil slick.”15 Sanders is saying (at least) two fascinating things here. The first, and more obvious, has to do with music itself—and the kind of “slick” production that the Los Angeles music industry was known for—as opposed to the rawer, less polished sound of the Bay Area, for instance. Having just taken a whack at David Crosby and Stephen Stills (but mysteriously leaving Graham Nash alone), Sanders seems to be indicting the “plastic” music of Los Angeles more broadly.
If “oil slick” can be read as a reference to the overly smooth music of Crosby, Stills, and their followers, it also must be interpreted as “oil slick.” The worst oil spill in United States history—not surpassed until the Exxon Valdez accident of 1989—resulted from a “blowout” off the coast of Santa Barbara in late January 1969. This environmental tragedy, “five miles off the coast from the aptly named small coastal community of Summerland,” was covered in painful detail in the mainstream and alternative press—from Life to Ramparts. The spill devastated the area’s animal life and also led to a remarkable amount of local and national activism. Geographers Keith Clarke and Jeffrey Hemphill, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, trace an impressive number of substantial developments in the environmental movement (including the beginning of UCSB’s own environmental studies major) to the spill. A little more than a year after Southern California’s ecological disaster, Sanders is invoking Union Oil’s spill to make a (hyperbolic) claim about the power of communal song to effect social change.16
Sanders would change his own tune about the Manson Family over the course of the trial and his additional research for his book. But for now I want to savor this moment of appreciation for the music the Family made at Spahn Ranch. A few months before Sanders published this appreciation, the Freep ran a poignant story under the headline “Media Ignore Manson Music.” This story, by Dave Mason (apparently not the same Dave Mason of the British rock band Traffic, who in 1971 would record an LP with Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas) offered a sharp critique of members of the media who visited Spahn Ranch to take part in what, essentially, was supposed to be a release party for Manson’s LP Lie.17 The event had to be postponed once, because of the demands of Manson’s legal situation (this was in the midst of wrangling having to do with Manson’s pro per status), and when it did take place, only Paul Watkins and Brenda McCann were available to represent the Family; its usual spokesperson, Lynnette Fromme, was “downtown trying to see Charlie.” Mason uses the occasion of the record’s release to excoriate other members of the media who attended the press conference but then filed stories that had nothing to do with the release of Manson’s music. While those journalists were not at all averse to “exploiting” Manson’s “police . . . made image” in order to “sell advertising,” they proved unwilling to take seriously the media critique expressed by the Lie cover (helpfully explained to Mason by the record’s producer, Phil Kaufman) and especially intent on silencing Manson’s voice and vision as captured by the album’s songs. This, to Mason, was especially egregious given Judge William Keene’s recent decision to revoke Manson’s pro per status.18 In addition to this critical article by Mason, the Free Press made space in the same issue for a large coupon/advertisement promoting the record.
Half a year later, Sanders invoked the California oil slick again, but this time with an additional sharp political argument in the mix. In a piece whose manifest content was an account of a visit Sanders made to visit Bobby Beausoleil at San Quentin (“It seemed incongruous to be discussing Frank Zappa with a condemned man on Death Row”), the Free Press cor
respondent takes time out to consider how the Manson trial serves the interests of the dominant culture:
Manson is an alcoholic editor’s dream come true—an oversexed, acid-gobbling, long-haired, nearly middle-aged, song-singing, devil-worshipping, bastard son of a teen-age prostitute who thinks he’s Jesus and who formerly was arrested for white slavery. With people like Manson on the front page, you don’t have to do any serious investigative reporting. And the authorities can shoot as many Mexican-Americans as they want. And the real criminals, the criminals with the computers and the oil slicks, walk around worshipped.19
In addition to the obvious “Bread and Circuses” critique of the social function of the courtroom drama for the media, Sanders is also using the case to bring attention to a different August crime than the one Manson was on trial for—the murder of Los Angeles journalist Ruben Salazar, on August 29, 1970. Ruben Salazar, as Hector Tobar has explained, was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and “also news director at KMEX, L.A.’s pioneering Spanish-language television station. He was the city’s leading Latino media voice, and he had been critical of police abuse.” On August 29, Salazar was covering the National Chicano Moratorium march in East Los Angeles—a protest against the Vietnam War and the disproportionate number of Mexican Americans who had died in that conflict. Salazar was killed that evening, in the Silver Dollar Bar, when a deputy from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department shot a tear gas projectile that pierced Salazar’s skull.20
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